


The Unexpected Kindness of the Military Man

by Jay Tryfanstone (tryfanstone)



Category: CHERRY GARRARD Apsley - Works, The Worst Journey in the World - Apsley Cherry Garrard
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Written in 2015 for 2014 prompt, Yuletide, coldfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-01
Updated: 2016-01-01
Packaged: 2018-05-10 21:46:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5602198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tryfanstone/pseuds/Jay%20Tryfanstone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The hammer stopped. From behind the half-built pony stalls, a construction Cherry had never before seen on the deck of a ship, emerged a tall, slouching figure, wearing lamentable trousers and a sailor’s jersey.  His boots, dusty and cracked, had once been very good indeed: Lobb, if Cherry was not mistaken.</p><p> </p>
            </blockquote>





	The Unexpected Kindness of the Military Man

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lightcudder](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lightcudder/gifts).



> So. This story.
> 
> Back when the 2015 Yuletide request listing was being compiled on AO3 (not nominations, requests) I was convinced that Aspley Cherry-Garrard's _The Worst Journey in the World_ was listed. And I was truly excited, because I've been wanting to write Titus Oates for a while. I stalked the letters spreadsheet, and also remembered that the fandom had been requested in 2014, I just hadn't had time to write it. Looking at the Yuletide tags, listing Oates and Cherry-Garrard and no one else (and Scott and Birdie Bowers are reasonably prominent in the original text) , I was pretty sure it was that 2014 requester, Lightcudder, who had made the same request. It's [here](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/yuletide/collections).
> 
> So, I wrote this story. And then, when I came to post, discovered I was mistaken. Either the fandom had been requested and withdrawn, or I'd originally been looking at the 2014 requests. (Which...I don't think I was.) I did try and find that 2015 requester, and failed. (Isis, sorry, if you're reading this!) So, Lightcudder, I'm really sorry if you have fallen out of love with the fandom: I'm really sorry if for whatever reason, you'd prefer not to have this unrequested story.
> 
>  

_West India Dock, London, May 1910_

“Hullo!” Cherry cried out. 

The hammer stopped. From behind the half-built pony stalls, a construction Cherry had never before seen on the deck of a ship, emerged a tall, slouching figure, wearing lamentable trousers and a sailor’s jersey. His boots, dusty and cracked, had once been very good indeed: Lobb, if Cherry was not mistaken. 

He was unsmiling, direct, but the creases at his eyes were laughter lines. 

“Good afternoon, sir,” Cherry said. “Cherry-Gerrard. Cherry. If another pair of hands would be useful, I’m your man.”

“No test tubes to set up?”

Every scientist Scott had recruited appeared to require enough equipment to stock a Cambridge laboratory, save Cherry. He managed to stem his blush. “I am on the scientific staff,” he acknowledged. “But more as an...aide-factotum than a maestro. An adaptable helper, I assure you, with no urgent task for the time being.”

He was aware of being scrutinised, and bore the inspection as best he could, resisting the urge to square his shoulders and straighten his back, forcing himself to remember that the excruciating days of playing fields and team sports were long gone. Rowing had given him the physical assurance his school days had lacked, but there was no disguising the bottle-glass of his spectacles or his gentleman’s hands.

“Not a carpenter, then.”

“But willing,” Cherry acknowledged.

“Then I’d be glad of the help. I’m Oates,” Oates added, his hand extended.

“Of the Inniskilling Dragoons?” Cherry asked, recalling his list of expedition members. Oates’ hands were hard, calloused, his grip swiftly professional. “Captain Oates?”

“There’s only one Captain on a ship,” Oates said, grimly amused. 

 

_Simon’s Town, South Africa, August 1910_

“Any plans for shore, Titus?” Bowers asked. “Shall we see you at the Admiral’s dinner?”

“As he has no evening clothes but two hunting jackets, I strongly suspect our cavalryman’s desired shore companions to be equine rather than human,” Atkinson assayed. “Am I right?”

Oates shrugged. “I may have secured an invitation to our host’s stables in preference to his dinner table,” he said.

“And I suspect the Admiral keeps his own pack of hounds,” Debenham said, drawling. “Not, of course, as fine as the Mhow pack, but nevertheless our soldier will soon be found...how did Wilde put it? The unspeakable – or perhaps the unspeaking - in pursuit of the uneatable?”

“The less said by our antipodean friends on a matter of which they know nothing, the better!” Nelson interjected. “Titus, how is the hunting here? Is there much game?”

“Not the season,” Oates said. “Meares, you’ll join me. Cherry? Atkinson.”

“I fear we should consider ourselves dragooned,” Atkinson said. As the assembled company groaned, he flung up a hand. “Nevertheless, I’d be more than content to join the party if there are horses to spare.”

“Oates,” Cherry said quietly. “Oates, I do not hunt.”

“Neither, I suspect, do the Admiral’s hounds,” muttered Oates.

But later, wheeling at the end of the ridgeline, unencumbered by dogs, Oates was smiling. He sat a horse as if born to the saddle, and although the cavalry must have given him the military straightness of his back, it had not given him the sensitive lightness of his hands, nor his swift sympathy with a young and untried mare. Cherry, an experienced rider himself, could only admire the result. “Bravo!” he shouted, reining back as it became obvious this was a race he could not win.

“Well ridden!” Oates called back, leaning down to pat his horse. 

“This is glorious!” Cherry exclaimed, “Superb! What a view!”

They had left the sea behind them on the Wynburg road, and the scrub of the coastal plain had given way to rolling countryside, scattered with stunted trees and oddly tangled brush. After the close quarters of the ship, the living horse under him, the space and the fresh, dry air was a tonic better than any medicine. “A topping idea!” he shouted to Oates. 

They were alone. Half a mile behind, Atkinson and Meares were ambling in what Cherry guessed to be amiable silence. “And without-” he swallowed and carried on. “Thank you for turning down the offer of the hounds.”

“And you call yourself an Englishman,” Oates said.

“One can be an Englishman without espousing the destruction of one of God’s creatures,” Cherry said. “The wanton cruelty of – the chase, the pain-” His mare shifted under him, uneasy. “I am sorry, Oates, but slaughter is not to my taste.”

“Ah,” said Oates. He had stopped smiling. “But hunting is not, you see, about the fox.” 

 

_Cape Evans, August 1911, after the Winter Journey_

They ate first. Bread and jam and cocoa, as much as they could stomach and more than enough, fingers thawing painfully around the wonderful cruelty of the warmth of enamel mugs, clothing steaming, toes shot through with the agony of heat. Scott and Meares sawed Wilson’s clothing off as he sat at table, the melting ice puddling on the floorboards and his anorak so frozen it fell from his body in great slabs. Gradually, Cherry realised that the weight on his own shoulders was lifting, stared down, and found Oates, in pyjamas, kneeling at his feet, wielding a breadknife along the seam of Cherry’s trousers. 

“Hold still, you bloody fool,” Oates swore at him, the blade catching.

“I don’t think I can move,” Cherry tried to say, and found his voice half-gone, a shattered croak. 

“Shhh,” said Oates, just as he would to one of the ponies, and then added sharply to Atkinson, whom Cherry belatedly realised was tugging at one detached sleeve. “Careful, watch his hands.”

“I see them,” Atkinson said.

Cherry’s fingers were swollen to twice their usual size with frostbites, blistered and blackened. His feet – he closed his eyes in agony as his boots were pulled off, and heard Oates swear again. In front of Wilson, no less, although if Wilson felt as fagged out as he looked, there would be no repercussions.

“Bill,” Scott said. “Bill, such a journey. Good Heavens, man, this will never be forgotten.”

“Well,” said Bowers firmly, “I am hoping very much to forget, at least tonight.”

Cherry laughed into his cocoa, hiccupping, and found himself blanketed in warmth, cradled in his own paisley dressing gown and a knitted blanket, and then flung on top of it an eiderdown liner. They must have got his clothes away, but he was still shivering. 

“Cherry? More cocoa?”

“Thank you,” he managed, tried to hold the mug out, and found it slipping from his frozen fingers. Oates steadied it for him.

“I say...bran mash,” Cherry said to him, recalling in a haze of approaching comfort Oates lecturing on the care of horses.

“I think I can do better than that,” Oates said, and extracted from somewhere – his pyjama pockets, Cherry thought, wondering – a small flask, and splashing brandy into the mug along with cocoa. The smell was heavenly, mixed with the fug of tobacco and the blubber stove and fried pemmican, familiar and homely. 

“I trust that was not drawn from the medical stores,” Atkinson said, very dry.

Oates grunted.

Cherry drank, a heated, dizzying pleasure, and was abruptly asleep.

In the morning, there was more food, Clissold turning out toast and soup and pie and more toast, with as much butter as they could eat and endless tea and cocoa, until even Bowers had to sit back from the table with a sigh. But then, wonderful in the steaming heat, there was hot water, enough to shave and feel human again, and even enough for a bath apiece if only Cherry’s fingers would allow. They were all half-crippled, stiff as lead, creaking, shuffling: Cherry had lost three toenails and despaired of two more, and Bowers had lost ten pounds in six weeks. 

“Hold still, before you cut your own throat,” Oates said, and took the razor from his clumsy fingers.

Cherry, dazed by warmth, surrendered. Surrendered, too, to Oates’ careful undressing, his steadying hands as Cherry stepping to the bathtub, his gentle touch with soap and flannel and towel.

“I suppose it is not so very different from the ponies, Oates,” Cherry said, half-dressed and elated with cleanliness.

Oates snorted. “You don’t bite,” he said. Then, as he pulled up Cherry’s trousers, careful of the frostbites on his feet. “My dear, I suspect you might as well call me Titus by now.”

After a moment, Cherry started to laugh.

 

_Cape Evans, October 1911_

“He simply fails to understand what cruelty his plans entail. If I could have – but he will not be moved.” Titus’ voice was harsh with frustration, necessarily low. “All I can hope is to spare them as much as I can. And then, we are so poorly equipped with firearms – Meares, I swear, if I have to wield that ice-pick again-”

Meares grunted. “A poor show,” he said. “We both know it.”

In all conscience, Cherry could no longer listen unacknowledged. “Gentlemen?”

“Cherry?” Titus said. 

“Yes,” said Cherry, ducking under rafters and emerging into the warm half-dark of the stables. This was Titus’ domain, Chateau Oates, where he and Meares communed in silence over the blubber stove, boiling up pemmican for the dogs and smoking endless pipes of London tobacco. From the stalls, he could hear Michael whuffle in greeting, swiftly followed by the thud of Chinaman’s hooves against the division.

He’d brought a biscuit, sneaked it to Michael under pony’s mane and his own crooked arm. Michael’s whiskers pricked his palm, the pony’s breath warm and damp.

“You’ll spoil that pony,” Titus muttered.

Cherry buried his nose in Michael’s neck, the sweet-sour smell of his hide, just as he’d done as a boy with his own first pony. If he closed his eyes, he could be in the stables at Lamar. 

There was a pointed cough. Someone, probably Meares, tapped out a pipe on the stove, a sceptical wordless coda.

“My dear boy,” Titus said. “That is merely conditioning.”

“One does not spoil dogs,” Meares said.

“Your dogs are ravening devils,” Titus said. “Give me a horse – a good horse! – any day.”

“Not on the barrier,” Meares said. 

“Tell that to-” Titus stopped. “Anything other than that bloody, wretched man-hauling,” he said, quietly, with force. “And if the ponies last more than ten days on the snow, I’ll be dammed. The Norskies have the right of it. A hundred and twenty dogs...”

“Amundsen’s no fool. The depots will already be in place.”

“If only Scott would agree to kill the ponies,” Titus said. “To drag them out to the glacier and back again is nothing more than sentimental claptrap. Kinder by far to kill them on the march. Then cache the meat.” 

Cherry straightened. “We may need them later,” he offered, one hand still buried in Michael’s mane, at the arch of his neck where the muscle was hard and warm.

“For what?” Meares snapped. 

From the hut, the Victorola started up. The record grooves, Cherry noted, were wearing down. 

It was Titus’ turn to empty his pipe. “Anton, pass the pot, the one with the brush – good boy. Cherry, how are your feet? The troops swore by surgical spirit.”

“He’s been trying to harden their hooves,” Meares remarked.

“Boots off,” Titus said, and gestured towards the stove with the brush. “Feet up.” He’d already pulled down a blanket.

It stung his healing frostbite, but the skin on Cherry’s feet toughened in days. 

 

_Beardmore Glacier, December 1911_

“Titus,” said Cherry, hurrying. “Titus, wait!”

When he thought himself unwatched, Titus limped. His shattered thigh, ruined by a bullet in the Boer war – “I thought I would bleed to death,” Titus had said quietly – left him with one leg an inch shorter than the other. The cuts in his hand had never quite healed. He had spent himself unmercifully in the long haul to the glacier, rising early to feed the ponies, mending harness, out in every blizzard and often hunkering down beside the protective walls rather than fill the tent with melting snow. He’d been marching fifteen miles at a stretch with Christopher, who refused to stop once started, the most vicious of all the ponies. 

“Titus!”

It had taken Cherry and Bowers and Wilson an hour and a half, with three men in the tent, to cook and tend their feet. On the depot journey, two hours, with four men. With five in the tent...and they were already starting late in the season....

“What?”

“Titus,” Cherry said, and found himself at a loss. One could not, after all, say to a...to a friend, that one wished he would not go, not when...well, it was Titus or himself, really, for that fifth spot in the tent....

Sound carries over ice.

“I wish you the very best of luck,” Cherry said, holding out his hand. It seemed an absurdly formal action. 

“Soldier!” Wilson called from the sledge. They were harnessing up.

Titus looked up. Under the rim of his hat, rimed by ice, his eyes were very dark. “Thank you,” he said, and shook hands.

**Author's Note:**

>  
> 
>  _Mea culpa_. I find Captain Oates a far more sympathetic character than Captain Scott, and must apologise to anyone preferring a kinder viewpoint. 
> 
> Additional detail not drawn from Aspley Cherry-Gerrard’s _The Worst Journey in the World_ , is taken from _Captain Oates_ , by Sue Limb and Patrick Cordingley, and Sara Wheeler's _Cherry_. Outside the confines of Yuletide, I feel I can say that Michael Smith's biography of Oates, _I May Be Some Time_ , is a miserable read. Anything good about it is better written in _Captain Oates_ , and the less said about the rest the better.


End file.
